1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for executing Input/Output requests.
2. Description of the Related Art
A hard disk drive receives input/output (I/O) requests with respect to locations on a disk drive. The I/O requests may be received at a rate faster than they can be executed with respect to the disk drive permanent storage medium. In such case, the I/O requests are either queued or postponed. FIG. 1 illustrates the arrangement of a recording surface typical for a disk drive 2 divided into concentric circular “tracks” on the disk surface. If there are multiple disks, then the vertical alignment of the tracks, on the disks aligned in parallel, together comprise a cylinder (physical definition). The outer cylinder is shown as reference 4. Each cylinder is further divided into user data sectors 6a-h and prerecorded servo sectors 8a-h. A logical block address (“LBA”) is used to address a specific location (user sector) within the disk stack and is mapped by the disk drive control electronics to physical location, the head number indicates a particular head in a multi-disk system, and sector.
The total access time for an individual request can be broken-up into sequential phases, referred to as seek time and rotational time. Seek time is the time period for the servo system to position the actuator from the current head and cylinder position to the new target head and cylinder position. The rotational time represents the remaining time, after seek completes, to rotate the sector from the source or current sector location to position the target sector under the transducer read/write head.
Thus, the total access time is determined by the seek time for radial positioning and the rotational access time for circumferential positioning the head over the target sector. Further details of how to calculate the seek and rotational times are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,729,718, entitled “System for Determining Lead Time Latency as Function of Head Switch, Seek, and Rotational Latencies and Utilizing Embedded Disk Drive Controller for Command Queue Reordering,” which patent is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Queued I/O requests do not have to be executed in the order they are received. Thus, the queued I/O requests may be reordered to maximize throughput. One reordering method, termed “Shortest Seek Time First,” or SSTF, reorders requests such that the request with the shortest seek time with respect to the request being executed is executed next. Current rotational position ordering (RPO) methods reorder the queue to minimize the combination of seek time and rotational time, or optimize total throughput. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,729,718 and 5,548,795, entitled “Method for Determining Command Execution Dependencies Within Command Queue Reordering Process,” which patents are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety, describe an RPO method for queuing requests that considers both seek and rotational delay times. Each queued request includes a field to store the results in calculating the delay time with respect to a reference request, which is the request currently being executed at the head of the queue. This latency time is calculated for each queued request with respect to a request at some specified position in the queue, e.g., the head of the queue, or n calculations in a queue of n I/O requests. The request having the shortest execution time is promoted to the position immediately following the current command being executed (e.g., head of the queue). This algorithm is then repeated and execution times are calculated with respect to the just promoted I/O request. Thus, with current RPO reordering techniques, calculations in the order of n2 are performed to completely reorder the entire queue. Alternatively, shorter sub-optimal reordering techniques can be applied.
With current prior art queuing techniques, the I/O queue in the disk drive unit is limited in size and maintains limited information on attributes of the queued I/O requests. For certain low priority I/O requests, such as those initiated by applications performing background, backup or clean-up related operations, the benefits of reordering such requests are minimal because, from the standpoint of the application that initiated the request, improved execution time of the I/O request is not necessary. In such instances, the costs of reordering the queue substantially outweigh the benefits of any reordering. Moreover, with current RPO reordering techniques, the processor overhead needed to reorder the entire queue can have significant affects on performance as the processing of I/O requests is delayed until the queue is reordered. Furthermore, since in many applications response time is at least as important as overall throughput, the execution of low priority commands can be detrimental to other more time critical commands. Furthermore, for certain applications the overall execution time of the application can depend on the response time or sequence of the commands being worked through. In current art, applications may disable the reordering operations to eliminate the cost of reordering, which has the negative effect of increasing request response times.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an improved methodology for reordering I/O queues.